It’s that time, and with the enforced downtime that is the children’s end-of-year vacation, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on all the changes of the past 12 months (and, you know, actually start writing again). Settling into our new home, the children getting older, our daughter finally starting to grow some hair (we make […]
Author Archives: Dan
I love to cook. I love wandering through a grocery store looking for interesting ingredients, paging through cookbooks, chopping vegetables, measuring, mixing, sautéing, baking. As a programmer / manager, I don’t have that many opportunities to make something physical, but cooking is an intensely pleasurable experience, especially when the results match the intentions. Unsurprisingly, I don’t like […]
You wouldn’t think that a post like this would be necessary, but as I recently went through a frustrating bit of config hell in what I’d expected to be a straightforward process, I thought I’d write down the procedure that worked for me. Download and install Android Studio Download the latest version Follow the instructions […]
It’s been a couple of months since I left TripAdvisor, and as I’ve been coming up for air, I’ve been going through the necessary process of re-evaluating the conventional wisdom I’d come to accept over the past six and a half years. Some of it was great – generally applicable best practices that I’ll use for years to come. […]
We had a problem. Facebook had just come out with the Like button, and had provided code snippets that allowed you to badge pages with Like counts. The problem was that it took a couple seconds for the number of Likes to load, and in some cases the resulting text was bigger than the allowable […]
My uncle held on to his 56k modem for years. We tried, and tried, to persuade him to switch to broadband, but he was absolutely convinced that 56k was all that he would ever need or want. It wasn’t about the money, or the hassle, or an intentional desire to limit his internet use – he had […]
I love to cook. It has all the visceral satisfactions of creating something real, developing mastery, and (if things go well) being yummy. Although I’m mostly known on my team for my quick breads (seriously, I just follow the recipe), I generally prefer savory to sweet. And so, I thought I’d share a couple of […]
As I mentioned in my last post, my startup has just shipped its first public release! It’s a good feeling to be iterating instead of writing from the ground up, and I thought it would be a good time to take a deep breath and reflect on where we’re at. Architecture Scratch is built using an entirely Javascript […]
I commuted for years. Up and down Route 95, every day, over and over. On a good day it might take me 45 minutes to an hour each way, but one and a half hours was common, and there were a couple of three hour nightmares tucked in over the years. At the same time, […]
In 1997, Clay Christensen published the landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In this book he went through a variety of industries (hard drives, backhoes, steel mills) and demonstrated the frustratingly similar pattern of how companies innovated, then stagnated – for entirely rational reasons. The key graph looks like this: The idea is that for any product, […]